“You’re sure you don’t want me to drop you at the station and you can go back to Moscow?” he asked her. “We may be in danger.”
“No, not at all. It’s my story. I’m on it, I will follow it. Now it’s even more interesting. What could it possibly be linked to, seventy years later, that would matter?”
They slipped into the restaurant, where a breakfast buffet was set up, and went heavily into yogurt, fruit, juice, and coffee. Then they slipped out to the secluded open-air dining section and sat in leafy splendor.
Swagger had seated himself to watch the entrance; he noted the exits, he examined the waitstaff to make sure each was familiar and dressed identically to the others, he checked everything that moved. He also secretly wished he had a gun and felt very vulnerable without one.
“No climbing today,” said Reilly. “All right, there’s a city not far away called Kolomiya, about thirty kilometers to the south. They have a famous Easter-egg museum.”
“Great idea,” Swagger said.
“What’s interesting about it is that it’s also got something called the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. A great collection, the guidebook says, of stuff from the war — they never forget, it never goes away, it’s Ukraine, Stronski told you the flowers on the graves are always fresh, remember? Maybe there’s something there that’s worth seeing.”
“Yeah, that’s good, I like that. Plus, on the highway we get to see what’s coming, what isn’t. Nobody sneaks up on us.”
The museum was another melancholy hall of sacrifice and valor. The partisan movement against the German invasion had been relatively successful but monstrously expensive. It was a war without prisoners, mercy, or hesitation, with atrocity common on each side. The Germans wouldn’t dignify their opponents with the term “partisans” and officially called them bandits. They specifically determined that the rules of war were not to be obeyed in the matter of bandits, which let the leash off their counterterror troops for ad hoc massacres.
Walking the halls was looking into a tunnel in time, the end of which was a sepia rendition of the gallows, where the Germans hanged so many, or the pits, where they shot so many more.
“It’s pretty awful,” she said after another exhibit on the subject of a razed village, a community slaughtered. “It’s Yaremche times a thousand, so big that there’s nothing of Yaremche here. Eight hundred, six hundred, five hundred, gone in an afternoon. Yaremche’s puny hundred and thirty-five don’t get a mention.”
One of the halls turned to the Germans and exhibited uniforms, weapons, communication gear, boots, all of it safely behind glass. Swagger stared at a dummy SS man in the spotty-leopard dapple of the late-war camouflage-pattern smock, heavy jackboots, with an MP-40 in his hands and all the right equipment in place, the bread bag, the entrenching tool, a holstered Luger, a foot of wicked bayonet, the haversack, that instantly recognizable helmet with the medieval steel flare that covered the ears and back of the neck and made every Landser somehow look like a Teutonic knight out to slaughter the inferior. Next to the double lightning flashes on the collar of his tunic, the emblem of a curved sword was displayed.
Bob looked at the explanation, which was in three languages. He read the English one.
Counter-partisan soldier of SS-13th Mountain Division, Police Battalion, which was active in trans-Carpathian area in summer 1944. These men committed many atrocities and were especially feared and loathed by Ukraine citizenry.
“He’s our boy,” said Swagger. “He’s the guy who burned Yaremche and hunted Mili.”
“He’s scary,” she said.
“Mili knew how to deal with ’em. She did the hard work enough times. Great damn gal. Sniperwork, alone, taking fire. Still she’d put one center mass, and then he wouldn’t scare nobody no more. I’d put one right between his eyes,” Swagger said.
“It’s still a mystery, all these years later. These people, their adventure in death. What drove them? How did so many go insane?”
It was true. It wasn’t just partisan war, which can drive good men to do evil things. He knew that, had seen it. He thought: I’ve been on the wrong end of a partisan war. Unless you have, there’s no way you can feel the rage, the frustration, the fury that the straight-ahead soldier feels for an enemy who strikes at night, melts into the trees, and smiles at you and sells you a Coke the next day. When your buddies start showing up with their noses and dicks cut off, you tend toward peevishness. It’s a goddamn cesspool of bugs and leeches and rats and maggots, and it breeds atrocity, sure as hell.
This was something more. It wasn’t just frustration at taking casualties from the partisans. It was something darker, more troubling, a mass descent into the conviction of superiority along some bogus grounds that led them to believe they had the moral right to the slaughter. They had a butcher’s mandate. They had become death itself. After seeing so much blood, blood lost all meaning, and some limit had been broken and now there were no limits and one could kill and kill and kill. From the pits to the crushed villages to the camps, it was a melody in one dark tone.
Finally he said, “I’d like to pretend some of them didn’t fall for it. They didn’t all line ’em up and shoot ’em down, did they?”
“There may have been some good ones,” she said.
“We could use a good guy in this story. This poor girl lost in the land of the monsters. When does the hero show up?”
CHAPTER 22
The Auntie Ju took off from the Luftwaffe airfield at Uzhgorod, flew low to the north, and banked east through a gap in the Carpathians at Tarnopol. She stayed low over the Ukraine flatlands as her pilots put her on course for Chortkiv, ten kilometers behind Red lines so that, when she reached the drop zone, she could climb to five hundred meters and let the boys out to do their jobs. She should make it fine, since there was no Soviet radar this far south of Moscow, the Red Air Force rarely flew at night, and even the anti-aircraft gunners, in this lull before the offensive everyone knew was coming, got some extra shut-eye.
What was left of Battlegroup Von Drehle fit into the one plane, though it was tight within the corrugated tin fuselage, all the boys knee to knee, facing each other in the cramped space. All wore the clipped Fallschirmjäger helmet, its flaring Teutonic rim removed so that it looked something like the leather hat the ridiculous Americans clapped to their heads when they played a game they insisted on calling football. All wore the faded “splinter” forest-pattern camo smocks, which the fellows sportingly called “bone bags,” knee pads, and lace-up boots, the latter mandatory if you didn’t want your shoes falling off while you floated down. All had combat harnesses and their FG-42s or STG-44s strapped across their bodies. All wore a collection of magazine pouches suspended horizontally on either side of their chests, on a kind of horse-collar shoulder harness, and in each pouch nested a box of twenty 7.92s or thirty 7.92 Kurzs. All wore RZ-20 parachutes, which made all uncomfortable, though if you were going to jump out of an airplane, you could put up with a little discomfort. All wore their parachute infantry emblems, a stylized plunging eagle in gold upon a silver wreath. All wore their seventy-five-engagement badges. All wore bread bags on slings, though loaded with M-24 grenades. All weighed a ton with all the junk on.
Some smoked, some just looked out disconsolately into the distance. Hard to read expressions, as all had smeared their faces with burnt cork, so they looked like a very bad minstrel show about to break into a lackadaisical “Old Man River.” It wasn’t really a group anymore, in the grand military meaning of that term, which conjured divisions and regiments and battalions, and was called one these days only as an administrative convenience. It was more of a squad, one officer, one noncommissioned officer, and thirteen men. But you couldn’t say “battlesquad,” as that sounded ridiculous, and these parachutists cared entirely too much about their damned dignity.